by S. Victor Aaron Last year brought the welcome return of Enrico Rava’s 1975 masterwork The Pilgrim And The Stars to American shores for the first time in CD form. Only a few months later, we’re getting treated to a new set of recordings by Italy’s foremost jazz musician. NewRead More

by Pico A berim-what??? Yeah, that’s right, a berimbau. Indigenous to the northeast region of Brazil, this bad boy is a single wire-stringed percussion musical instrument that’s sort of like a bow with a hollowed-out gourd on the bottom of it and played with a wooden stick, with the toneRead More

by Pico On January 27, ECM Records presents yet another recording of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack deJohnette in concert. This will make it the fourth one…from 2001 dates alone. Prior to this performance in Tokyo, The Out-of-Towners, Always Let Me Go and one we’ve covered here previously, MyRead More

XTC was a band that gave pop music a good name. Since their bare, new wave/punk beginnings, melody always mattered.

David “Fathead” Newman, one of our favorite tenor men, has passed after a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 75. A Dallas native, Newman left college to tour with Charlie Parker’s mentor, Buster Smith. He then found fame as a sideman with Ray Charles, spending 12 seminal years inRead More

NICK DERISO: The blue-eyed soul template has been copied so many times that it can feel like a faded and calculating conceit, something singers do simply to attact a demo. Unless you’re Eric Lindell, a native of San Mateo, Calif., who not only aspires to a Van Morrison/Delbert McClinton-level ofRead More

The Sweet brings back memories of a time when a pop song could be ambitious, melodic – and still be popular.

by Pico In 1939, German immigrant Alfred Lion founded Blue Note Records along with Max Margulis as a label dedicated to signing and recording jazz and blues artists. Over the years, this label became a central part of jazz history itself, as it became the home for seminal recordings byRead More

by Nick DeRiso With a shout — and a persona — to match this barrel-house presence, Big Joe Turner lived up to his outsized name every night. Turner’s emergence was tied to those brawny blasts, since Joe came of age in a time when singers had to project past bigRead More

by Nick DeRiso Masterpieces seem to come at us all at once, like epiphanies and summer storms. But the making of such things is more a journey than a lightning bolt, with ideas and elements to mix and match along the way. That’s the case with Dave Brubeck’s superlative 1959Read More